Saturday, January 23, 2016

Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

I didn’t want to lose
anything. That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a
record of everything that had ever happened.

I wrote about myself so
I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what
had happened and be done with it.

More than that, I wrote
so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough.
The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d
missed it.

Imagining life without
the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be
dead.

And
so opens American writer Sarah Manguso’s new Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf Press, 2015). Manguso has long been one of my
favourite writers, and her writing is, quite simply, remarkable. I had already been an admirer of her poetry, but her move into non-fiction/memoir has really
opened up the possibilities of the form. A short essay-book on memory, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is built
as a slow accumulation of self-contained sections, and begins by describing how
she has composed a daily diary for most of her life. She quickly describes the
realization that having a child both opened up the impossibility of daily work
on her memory-project, and allowed her the permission to not have to record
every single moment. As with much of Manguso’s prose, the writing in Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is
elegant and incredibly straightforward, and deeply intimate while allowing
herself, seemingly, to guard a variety of personal details that would, quite
honestly, distract away from the purpose of the essay. Her writing is also
extremely difficult to excerpt, and must be seen as an entire, singular whole. She
writes:

Living in a dream of
the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in
nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is
hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or
failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.

I still needed to
record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to
know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.

Remember the lessons of
the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present,
the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory.